


anywhere beside you is a place that I'll call home

by hypotheticalfanfic



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: A little fluffy, Chickens, Gardens & Gardening, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, leave them alone
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 08:59:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11181393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: Just let them have a quiet little life, please?Remembering and restarting and trying to build something in a yellow house in the middle of nowhere.





	anywhere beside you is a place that I'll call home

“No, I said.” Steve’s hand traces a line, another line, crosshatches and shades in, and Fury sees his own face emerge upside down, excavated from a sketchpad. He looks angry, a little confused, and that’s just the bare edges, Steve’s not even done.

“Son, we—“

“Don’t call me son.” Mild tone, but Fury knows it well enough now to know that if he keeps pushing, the next thing will be shouted and the next movement will involve throwing something.

“Cap, then. We need him. He’s got intel and training we could use, could save lives.” Fury spreads his hands, demonstrating openness and transparency (he takes those stupid body language classes every quarter, like he’s supposed to, but bullshit if they ever seem to help). “He’s either an asset or a goddamned problem, so which is it gonna be?”

Steve is standing suddenly, carefully angling away, very clearly trying not to kill anyone in the room. “Call Bucky an asset again.”

Fury removes his hands from the firearms at his sides. “Sorry, Cap. Poor choice of words on my part.”

“Damn straight.” Steve’s breathing is still wrong, but Fury opens his mouth and, “Go to hell, Fury. I won’t tell you anything, not you or SHIELD or the Accords or whoever you work for these days. If he wants you to find him again, he’ll find you first.” Steve rolls his shoulders a couple of times. “On a related note, I’m going to be out of pocket for a few weeks. Call Sam if you need the world saved, or Dr. Banner.”

The room, empty, echoes back Fury’s string of curses.

The truth is, Steve’s not really one hundred percent on where Bucky is, either. He knows the general outline, and he knows that if he gets close Bucky’ll more than likely come and get him, but with the way they left things after Bucky came out of the chamber again, he’s not even sure he should do that. Being this far away, knowing Bucky’s out there in the world, alive alive alive, and not being next to him — it’s worse than knowing he’s dead. Some secret shameful part of him wishes they’d both died in the natural order, they’d been done, there wasn’t any need for this part of it. But the rest of him, all this body he feels too small for still, is so bone-deep grateful for the possibility. The maybe. The chance.

If he got to pick, he’d have put Bucky back in Brooklyn, back in his bed, back beside him, back in the days when they’d both been only themselves. But that’s not right, he knows, because Bucky isn’t really Bucky anymore, or not all the way anyway. The brief moments they’ve seen each other since the SHIELD betrayal, since the fight with Tony, since what happened after, Bucky’s been about eighty percent himself. The Winter Soldier was still there around the edges, ebbed and flowed a little, but never left. T’Challa’s scientists had pulled out most of the worst of it, but even Bucky hadn’t really expected them to fix him all the way back to normal. Add in the complication of Bucky before the war versus Bucky in the war - that hard-edged smile turned dark and vicious, the humor and charm wasted away into sarcasm and cynicism - and things got messier still. But Bucky, when he’d come out the last time? He was Bucky, and Steve had to stop himself from pulling the man into an embrace, from tackling him into the wall, from anything. Had always carefully maintained enough distance that Bucky knew he could exit the situation. Had made eye contact, had kept his hands open, hadn’t made a move in any direction.

He’d been rewarded, he supposed, when Bucky vanished from an allegedly secure facility without killing anyone (not one kill, and Steve knows full well how hard that is to do when you’re running scared and super powered). He got a note. Sure, it was brutally short, but it was there, tangible and real, scrawled in Bucky’s familiar scribble that was part joined-up letters and part block capitals and sprawling sideways down the page. It’d said, basically, to stay there, live the life, do the job. Then come looking later. To give him a little time. That went against every instinct Steven Grant Rogers has ever had about anything - to be patient and passive, to wait - but he swallowed down the panic and anger and hurt. Breathed in quiet and the faint lingering smell of metal and sweat from Bucky’s bed. Breathed in, in, in, and breathed out fear. “He’ll come back,” he said to the empty room, to the empty bed, to his empty heart. “We’ll get him back.”

For the time being, he obeyed orders. Ran a few miles (or a few dozen) in the morning, ate a healthy breakfast that tasted like ashes in his mouth, painted something he hated. Repeated, repeated, repeated until it was worn into the bones of him, and then a postcard arrived. The front said “Tampa” and the postmark said “Chicago” and the blank back told him it was from Bucky. Steve wept, leaning against his empty fridge, blank postcard dangling from a bruised hand. The next one, six weeks later, was postmarked Paris, Texas, and the front was the Eiffel Tower - a joke, a bad one, the kind Steve had always loved. So it went for a year, eight postcards with different postmarks and fronts, with wear and tear like they’d been carried around for a while, with not one word on the back.

The ninth postcard has a — Steve doesn’t know the word, a pack? A flock, maybe? Of turkeys. The postmark is Brooklyn, and Steve’s throat closes up like he’s having an attack. On the back, a scrawl that sparks a familiar ache: “Old days.”

Steve panics. This is a clue, this is his cue, and he doesn’t understand. Where to go? Where is he? How long does he have to find him? He has one really good-sized panic attack, drinks a pot of coffee, then makes a list. First he goes to the old apartment, or where it used to be anyway. It’s torn down now, all clean-lined office buildings, and he has to sign a couple autographs to get away. He goes to Coney Island for a week, just stays and waits. Nothing. He goes to Bucky’s parents’ graves, to his parents’, to the place the rest of the family buried Bucky’s sisters after the two of them were gone. Goes to places Bucky worked, bars they used to frequent, the VA, the fairgrounds, anywhere his memory places Bucky with a smile on his face. No joy.

Finally he goes home. He fucked it up, he lost him, and despair bleaches the color out of everything. He doesn’t even bother trying to get drunk anymore. Already knows it’s a losing game. He’s trying, as he does sometimes, to paint something that’s not just Bucky’s face when he gets it. “Fuckin’ meatball, that’s me.”

Flights from New York to Kentucky are expensive, but he takes pride in buying the ticket (under an assumed name on a throwaway credit card, he’s not an idiot all the time).

* * *

The flight is horrible. Steve has flown paratrooper missions in more comfortable settings, with less paranoia in his veins. He knows he shouldn’t feel this way, like every person in this pressurized metal container (and he mentally thanks Dr. Banner for that handy turn of phrase) is ready to hunt down Bucky and drag him away. Or kill Steve. Or kill Steve and Bucky. Or any number of horrible things Steve can’t get out of his head. He tries to focus on plans, on scenarios, but his hands shake worse and worse.

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” he hears the small dark-skinned woman next to him praying, and all he wants is to join her. His would be in Latin, but there’d be something there, some buoy of belief that the Mother of God, that sad-faced woman with soft eyes, Our Lady of being stuck in an impossible situation, would be rooting for him. He knew full well what the Catholic Church thought of the things he and Bucky did in the dark with smiles on their faces, but he was pretty sure that the Star of the Sea had seen it all before, and could smile on this endeavor anyway. She’d smiled on her son running off with a gang of poor, dirty fishermen, smiled on her son turning wild heretic preacher, and still wept for Him as He died. Steve’s mother had been a sad-faced woman, too, and had smiled at her own son as he’d run off with a poor, dirty-faced gutter rat like the Barnes kid. Whenever Steve prayed to the Virgin, he could see just an echo, a small glimpse of his own mother, and he wondered if it felt like that for everybody, if that’s why the Virgin was everyone’s favorite. A shudder, some turbulence, and he snaps back to where he is. He lets himself whisper along with the woman, who doesn’t notice until “pro nobis peccatoribus,” and then they make eye contact. He gives her the tiniest nod his huge head can give, and she steadies her hands. They finish the prayer, start it again, Steve in Latin and the woman rolling the beads, and then she looks up at him for another second. Looks back down.

Her voice is shaking, still, but a little less, as she starts, “We believe in one God,” and Steve joins in, “Patrem omnipotentem,” and they do that for a while. Steve stumbles just a bit around the Holy Spirit part, just like always, and he feels for one fleeting moment like everything’s going to be all right.

“I should have guessed,” she says as the landing announcements starts, “you’d say it in Latin. Haven’t heard that in a stone’s age. My abuela said it that way, too.”

“Your abuela and I are the same age, I’d bet,” Steve says, aiming for disarming and landing on sad. “Sorry.”

“She died last year, but she said the rosary every morning and the Creed every Sunday. Real religious. I’m not, not really, but flying, you know.” She gestures at the number of people crossing themselves almost unconsciously, and Steve gives his best photo smile. “I’m Ivy.”

“Steve,” he shakes her hand. “Although you probably knew that.”

She laughs, and something in Steve warms up. “Yeah, well. You know. My brother Manny swore he saw you when he was in New Jersey, you and that Romanov girl. We all told him he was making things up. Guess they’d think I was crazy if I told ‘em this one, huh?”

“I hate to ask, but,” he means to ask her not to tell anyone she saw him, but she reads something deeper in his face. She pushes the rosary into his hands. “No, that’s not what I, I can’t take this, ma’am, it’s—“

“It was my abuela’s. I’ve got my own. She’d like you.” The woman smiles, a shaky smile but real. “You seem like it’d help.”

“I don’t know if it will.”

“Can’t hurt.”

“Ma’am, I really—“

“Take it and I’ll light a candle for you this week. And I won’t tell anybody I prayed with Captain America while he was flying incognito on a plane to Kentucky. Deal?”

Steve’s professional smile morphs into a genuine grin. “Sounds good, ma’am.” They shake on it.

As Steve slips out of the airport, he lets one hand rest gently in a pocket, lets his fingertips just graze the wooden beads, lets his heartbeat pound out the rhythm of a prayer he hasn’t done in ages. “ Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio,” catches a bus, catches a cab, catches his breath. One, two, three, plain as oats, and he’s there. End of the road down the end of a road down a hidden back road that never seems to go anywhere. 

He thinks idly that he should have double-checked these coordinates before he came. Turkeys got him partway, to the old bar they’d only been to the once (that big ugly stuffed turkey on the wall, he’d forgotten it, amazed that Bucky’s brain still worked like that). Then the bartender’d done a part, too, the order of what Bucky’d liked, something horrible with lots of sugar. Then the lat and long had just appeared on one of the burner phones, like magic, like Bucky’d been in a back booth watching. Steve hadn’t even googled them until he’d already shed his tail. He could so easily be walking into a trap, he’s seen Stark hack a dozen systems while hungover, it’s not like it’d be hard, probably. “Holy Mother, Untier of Knots, please,” it’s not a canonical prayer but it’s more heartfelt than he’s prayed in years. “Please, please, please,” a litany, over and over. The Virgin Mother knows, he thinks, what would end that sentence. He sure doesn’t.

* * *

Steve walks up the dirt road, fear hanging around him like the heat. “Bucky, if you’re there, I’m, it’s me, it’s Steve.” All he can see is how perfect this place would be for an ambush, he doesn’t want to see it but it’s there, he’s not stupid, he’s got six great sniper spots earmarked already and Bucky did this for a living even before he got captured, shit shit shit what if Bucky—

“Hey, Stevie.” The voice is calm. Even. A little Brooklyn around the edges. “Took ya long enough.”

Carefully, slowly, Steve looks up. Bucky isn’t even obviously carrying a weapon (except the arm, some traitorous part of Steve whispers). His hair’s short again, he’s lost a little weight. Wearing jeans and a hoodie, he almost looks like a normal person, and it hurts to look at him but Steve can’t look away. “Yeah, I’m an idiot.” It’s never been truer than it is in this moment, and Steve’s stomach lurches, freezes.

“Nice to know some things don’t change.” Bucky crooks a half-smile. “Come on up to the house.”

“House?” The world is moving under Steve’s feet. Bucky has a house, or something close enough that he’s not calling it a camp or a bunker. A house.

Maybe he didn’t say it aloud, because Bucky continues, “Saw you coming, thought I’d walk with you. No snipers or anything around here, but the mosquitos are monsters, I’ll tell you.”

Steve can’t breathe, can’t breathe. “Is this a test?” It slips out of him before he can stop it, and he doesn’t even know what he means exactly.

“The test was the postcards all year, pal. You already passed.” Bucky reaches out the metal hand like it’s not any different, rests it on Steve’s shoulder. “Wanna head out?”

Steve is frozen. He cannot take a step. He cannot move. “Buck.”

Almost unthinking, like it’s a hundred years ago, Bucky pulls Steve’s shoulder forward, lurches him into one step. The next one is easier. “Come on. I’ll show you around.”

They walk, Bucky leading, Steve stagger-stepping behind, as if it’s before the war and Bucky’s found some doe-eyed dame to feed them dinner at a diner they’ll add into the rotation. “Gonna make me wash dishes for my supper?” Steve lets slip, but Bucky just laughs, sounds like a person again. Something eases up inside Steve, some shard of terror he hadn’t dug out since waking up in the wrong room in the wrong year. He hears himself ask, “How’s the arm?”

Bucky makes an obscene gesture with it, grins back over the metal shoulder. “Does what I need it to do. T’Challa’s a good kid when he’s not tryin’ to kill me.”

“He’s older than us, I think, Buck.”

“Depends on how you do your math, but I think I was out of cryo enough, put it all together, I’m older than most of them. Maybe not Stark, but close.”

The mention of Tony, as always, inserts a little extra tension into the conversation. “We almost there?”

Bucky turns forward, keeps walking. “Why, you gettin’ sleepy?”

They could be marching in any one of a hundred battlefields, any one of a hundred hellscapes, or he could be following Bucky to the Stark Expo or to Coney Island or back to their place after a night at one of the working girls’ squats downtown, following Bucky like he did every second right up until they switched places. He wants to sink into this moment so much it tastes like fear in his mouth, copper and strong and sharp, like a night in a trench trying so hard not to touch each other because they weren’t alone, not anymore.

The house is well-shaded, big trees and untrimmed wild bushes, but it’s painted a bright and cheerful yellow, and Steve cracks up.

“You makin’ fun of my house?” Bucky’s laughing, too, just off of Steve’s laugh.

“Never figured you for a yellow kind of guy, is all.”

Bucky spreads his hands wide, all innocence. “Yellow when I bought it, and I’m a disabled war vet, who’s gonna judge me not paintin’ my place?”

“This war vet right here,” Steve jerks one thumb toward his chest, feels his smile turn sharper. “I’m shocked - shocked! - to find non-regulation housing in this establishment. Soldier, I expect this place to be looking pristine enough for the Queen of England herself by—“ but now he’s laughing too hard, and Bucky’s bent nearly double, belly laughing like old days. It’s not that funny. It’s the adrenaline and the weirdness of their situation. A yellow house isn’t the funniest thing in the world. Two messed-up supersoldiers with a couple hundred years of PTSD between them is pretty funny, though, if Steve’s being honest. Add in the cyborg arm thing and the dancing monkey part, and that they’re in the woods in the middle of goddamned nowhere, and they can, he thinks, be forgiven for a little hysterical laughter.

“Lemme look around, disarm a thing, two shakes.”

Steve watches Bucky do a perimeter check, and it feels like home, keeps up the strange timeless nature of where they are. “Hey, don’t miss the—“

“Shut your trap, Stevie, I know the sniper st—“

“I’m not arguing, I’m just saying, you’re not even look—“

“Jesus Christ, will you shut your mouth, I’m doing it—“

“Yeah, well, I’ll do it if you’re gonna bitch about it so—“

“Like you get to talk, old man—“

But Steve laughs, can’t keep it up, it’s so familiar, the back-and-forth, no one gets to finish a sentence, saying terrible things to keep from saying something truly terrible, like “I love you” or “I missed you” or “come to bed with me.” Bucky grins, keeps scanning trees, a shitty winner like always.

“We should be good. Watch your step, it’s not booby-trapped but there’s a broken board I’m not fixin’ anytime soon.”

The door is broken, too, enough that opening it takes a trick Steve’s unsure he really saw. When they enter, it’s so dark that Steve’s eyes take a few moments to adjust, even with the fancy night vision stuff the serum had added. Details loom out of the dark. Two broken-down couches, a little TV, an overstuffed bookshelf, a record player, boarded-over windows. An open space, a round dining table with three mismatched chairs, a bowl in the middle full not of fruit but of knives. “Nice bowl,” Steve says, to no response. “What, nothin’ from the peanut gallery?”

“I wouldn’t touch ‘em, just a piece of friendly advice.” Bucky leads him deeper in. “Kitchen over there, dining, main. Bedrooms are back here.” They walk forward into a narrow hall; one room is mostly bare - boarded-up windows and a lonely little cot, a small desk, nothing personal in any way. A sharp dogleg, a cracked but serviceable bathroom. Across from that, Bucky’s room. It’s the darkest room in the house, a huge bed that almost touches the walls, basically nothing else on the floor. The walls, though. Photos and maps and scribbled charts. “Don’t look at those.”

Steve jerks back, worried.

“No, I mean, sorry, it’s not secret. I’m just a little paranoid. And my handwriting’s even worse now.”

“The docs in Wakanda tell you about that?”

Bucky shrugs one shoulder. “Dyslexia, I think they called it. Or somethin’, but the point is I got a metal hand now, you know? Holdin’ a pen, I mean, I can write fine for me to read it, but it’s better than code even.”

“You had that back then, too.” Steve has a jarring moment of unreality. His SHIELD-appointed therapist, just before Steve had stormed out, had listed off symptoms he would likely experience. He’d forgotten a lot of them, looked them up later. Didn’t matter. Brief dissociative state: that one had stuck in his memory. Here he stood, before the man who meant the most to him of anyone, who’d been dead and then alive and then brainwashed and then trying to kill him and then hiding from him and then brainwashed again and then come to his rescue and then, in the worst part of all of it, had left him. First for cryo, then for this place. Left. They’d never left each other, really, the war didn’t count. Been taken from each other, sure, but never just up and left. Here he stood, and here stood Bucky, and somehow this was all real, all happening, and Steve couldn’t tell if he was awake or dreaming, and didn’t much care. The world kept turning.

“Not this bad, though, you know?” Bucky shrugs again, the other shoulder, almost like it aches. It’s the metal shoulder, and Steve wants desperately to know if it hurts. If the Wakandan doctors fixed it. If it’s better, if Bucky’s in pain. “You look funny.”

“Thanks, asshole.” Slips out like a reflex.

“No, I mean you got a funny look on your funny-lookin’ face. Thinking deep thoughts, Mr. Rogers?”

And that, too, that’s something to shake the world. “You remember Sister Mary Patrick?”

Bucky scowls. “That old bird. Hated me somethin’ awful.”

“Well, you know. The Jewish thing.”

“And I st—“

“Not you, we stole the—“

“No, huh-uh, don’t start that noise with me. You lectured me about morality while I stole the Communion wine, don’t go takin’ the glory out of that, that was all me. You stood there and fretted, wouldn’t even take a sip.”

Steve hangs his head, only half-kidding. “It’s the blood of Christ, Buck.” Peeks up to see a shit-eating grin spread across that face. “God, I love you so much.” He honestly didn’t intend to say it yet, not now, maybe later, maybe never, but it’d slipped out so easy.

“Yeah, pal. I know. Love you too.” Bucky was still grinning, but he hadn’t said it like he was kidding. “Hungry?” 

“Um.” Steve shrugs. They’re not going to bring it up right now. That’s fine. He’s here until Bucky kicks him out, and probably would hang on with his fingernails even after that. “I mean, I could eat.”

“Yeah, looking like that, you eat all day I bet. Come on, we’ll make something. Soup? Noodles and ketchup? Whatever you want, long as it’s already in the pantry.”

The kitchen was always Steve’s before, back in the days when his contribution to the Keep Us Two Alive This Winter campaign had been soup and sandwiches and learning to make a pancake-thin slice of questionable meat feed the both of them. He’d borrowed recipe cards and sat at grandmothers’ feet and spent time in the library, all those “mend and make do” ladies giving him every tip they had because they all knew what it was to put something in front of someone you love, knowing full well it wasn’t near enough. The way your hands itched to do more, the way you didn’t dump your plate onto theirs because they wouldn’t take it, but you could lie, you could make their portion bigger and brook no argument, you could save every scrap all day until they got home and pretend you hadn’t.

The pantry’s military-neat, not stuffed but not bare either. He hands Bucky a box of dried pasta, a couple cans. “Hey, Buck?” Bucky turns around. Steve is holding a jar of marshmallow fluff the size of his head. “I’m not asking, I’m just pointing out. You got this, whatever it is—“

“Fuckin’ delicious is what it is—“

“Yeah, but no Twinkies?”

“Twinkies,” Bucky’s eyes light up. “I haven’t thought about those in…put ‘em on the list, I’ll go to town tomorrow.”

Steve places the jar (which, he notices, is half empty) back on the shelf. Scans the rest of the shelves, tries to find something else to get that look on Bucky’s face. “You got any coffee?” He doesn’t really want it, but anything to make this space in his soul stay open.

Bucky laughs a little. “Yeah, I’ll put the pot on the stove. Should probably get one of those plug in maker things, but with just me, didn’t matter. ’Sides, I like it the old way. Get me a mug too, willya?”

Didn’t matter, not doesn’t, and Steve allows himself one tremor, one moment to hope. Shakes his hands out, looks around. This kitchen is all Bucky’s, clear as day: he’d always been neat as a pin even before the military got its claws in him. Pantry organized like a plan of attack, fridge mostly empty but spotless and shiny, plates - Steve can’t breathe. “Over by the sink, pal.”

“No, yeah, thanks.” Steve pulls down two mugs. One, he notices, is from the Smithsonian exhibit on the Howling Commandos. “Nice mug.”

“Stole it. Last time I was there.” Steve doesn’t even get his mouth open before, “And don’t give me that shit, I donated and everything. Just keeping sharp.”

Steve takes that mug for himself. Sits and fiddles with it. “Plates down low, just like home.”

Bucky hums a little. “Huh, I’d forgotten that. Why’d we keep ‘em there?”

“Only had two cabinets, and we kept the hooch up with the cups in—“

“Shit, yeah, in those medicine bottles, I remember that.” A real laugh. “Jesus, I’ve got twice that many cabinets here. Oughta move ‘em, maybe.”

“No, I mean, if you want to, but I like it. It’s where I have mine, too.”

“Hey now, enough of that. Grab the salt for me.”

He obeys, the snap-to-it Sergeant voice striking some buried nerve. “Sir yes sir.” Snaps his best salute just to see Bucky roll his eyes.

“Don’t you outrank me by some ungodly number? I never made it past Sergeant, you know, asshole.”

“Probably my fault, huh? Dragging you around all them back alleys on secret missions.”

“Something like that.” Bucky throws in some noodles, fiddles with the coffee. “Got the garden out in the back, wanna go grab some stuff? The big weird green thing with the funny edges, leave that, I’m selling it tomorrow, but get some beets or whatever. I marked ‘em. I’m gonna get a chicken.”

“Going to the store?” Steve makes to pull out his wallet.

“The coop behind the shed. Got four full grown girls and a pain in my ass rooster I keep trying to shoo off. Keeps coming back.” A big grin. ”His name’s Steve.”

“You have chickens? And you didn’t show me? Come on, Buck, you’re killing me here.” Steve can’t breathe but it’s the other thing, the good thing. Bucky’s here, alive, mostly himself, safe and sound as anyone can be, growing vegetables and chickens, making dinner. It’s so close. Brooklyn wavers under the surface, body memory, but the rest of it is here. Here and open and welcome, Steve can feel it. He’s welcome here, for at least a little while.

“They don’t like people. Just me. I leave ‘em be. Anyway I’ve gotta kill one and I don’t,” a long pause. “You’ve seen me kill enough things, you know how it looks. No need to rehash. Go get some beets.”

“Sir, yes sir.”

* * *

The beets stain Steve’s hands, swirls of red and purple, and suddenly he wants to paint them. Wants to paint a dishtowel on a counter, two bowls two spoons two mugs dripping dry. Wants to paint Bucky, hair shorter now but different than the old days, sharpening a kitchen knife until it gleams. Wants to paint Steve the bad-tempered rooster standing on top of Bucky’s beat-to-hell truck, getting ready to shit all over it. He hasn’t wanted to paint in a year. “Think we could get some paints tomorrow? Just a few, nothing fancy.”

Bucky glances over at him. “Sure, Stevie. Whatever you want.”Steve picks up a ballpoint, starts to doodle on a napkin. The silence is comfortable, familiar, like an old blanket. “So when should I expect the stormtroopers?”

Steve is jolted out of his doodling. “What?”

Bucky nods at the door. “I’m guessing SHIELD or whoever ain’t happy with you disappearing. They’ll track you, right?”

Steve sets his jaw. “They can fuck right off. I got rid of all their gear, changed cars, everything. I was real careful.”

“And when they ask Stark to find you?”

A pain in Steve’s chest, just an echo. “I don’t know. We didn’t part on the best terms, but he’s a good man, deep down. Really deep. Under basically every layer he has, that last layer, that’s a good man.”

Bucky shrugs. “Not a problem. Want them dead or just stopped when they show up? Your pick, pal.”

“Not dead, not unless they’re trying to kill us, I think.” He should be surprised at how easy the answer spills out of him. He should be surprised that he didn’t pull on his Captain America voice and honor like a cloak, like a shield, like a blanket to hide under. Bucky’s seen him in the worst and the best, though, seen him shoot unarmed men dead without a thought, seen him beat the shit out of a bully or twelve, seen him lie and cheat and steal and beg. Bucky’s seen everything.

“Fair enough.” Bucky sharpens another knife, not a kitchen one, and then it disappears somewhere in the hoodie he’s wearing. “They can’t have me. I’m not going.” Bucky’s eyes are serious.

“What do I look like, an asshole?” Steve knows exactly what’s coming.

“You look like a little shit, just like you used to. Well, maybe a bigger shit now. Captain Shit of the US Army.”

Steve reaches one hand out to Bucky, rests it on his shoulder. “They won’t get you, Buck. I’ll kill ‘em myself first.” Presses one thumb in, a sense memory, something so familiar it hurts to think he hasn’t done this in months. Feels like longer. Years. Decades. A century or more. “Besides, they’d probably send Sam first, and you like him.”

Bucky huffs a little. “Oh, the one with the wings? Real cute? Yeah, he seemed like a standup guy when we stopped bitching at each other. I could take him, though.”

“Figure you could take any of ‘em, Buck.”

“Yeah, probably. You’d lose.” A devil grin, and Steve wants, he wants. Something is clawing at the inside of his chest, and he does not know what it will be when it climbs out of his mouth. It could be “I love you” or “I hate you” or “kill me” or anything, anything at all.

Steve heaves just for a second, takes his hand back, takes a moment to swallow, takes a deep breath. “When I woke up here, in the future I mean, it’d only been a few days for me. Since you died, I mean.”

“I’ve got a few years on you, then, kiddo.”

Steve gives him the finger. “Always gotta bring that up, asshole.” At Bucky’s wink, he keeps talking. “But I mean, what I’m saying is, I never really got to mourn. Not you, not the Commandoes, not—not anybody. Woke up, had a couple days, then aliens attacked New York and I had to go do that, then it was months of shit work and training and I never,” he runs out of breath. Goes to take another but it won’t come.

“Steve, hey, easy.” Bucky moves closer, puts away the potato he was peeling. “Come on, sweetheart, take a breath.” Bucky puts a hand on each of Steve’s shoulders, one burning hot and one freezing cold, presses down. “Just like old times, come on, breathe for me.”

Steve cannot breathe, cannot move, cannot stop the words from tumbling out. “I never, I mean, you were dead, you were dead and they were dead, everyone we knew is dead, everyone on our street, everyone we served with, everyone, they’re all dead and I’m here in this fucked-up body and I don’t look right and you were dead, Bucky, you were dead, I can’t, I can’t—“

Bucky’s mouth on his stops him. It’s not even a kiss, not really, Bucky just trying to stop him from talking. Then it shifts, becomes something different, and they’re gasping, both of them, out of breath and out of time, and Bucky’s hands move from Steve’s shoulders. One tangles in his hair, one pulls his hips forward, and Steve goes, it’s so easy. When Steve’s hands land on Bucky’s waist, though, it breaks the spell.

“Sorry, sorry Buck.” He’s not sorry at all.

“It’s okay, sorry, that was on me. I was just trying to—“

“I know, I know, I shouldn’t have, I mean, you’re not, you don’t have to, I mean—“

“No, Steve, look, it’s not that, I promise, it’s—“

“I just, I love you. I’ve loved you since we were kids messing around in Brooklyn, you know that.” Bucky doesn’t interrupt him. “Do you remember that?”

Bucky’s hands lift slowly from where they stayed after the kiss. “What do I look like, an asshole?”

“More like a bag lady, that hoodie you’re wearing.” Knife-sharp grins. “That was real, though, I mean, I love you. Like that. We used to do this. I’d prove it to you if there was a way, Buck.”

A crooked grin. “Think that kiss proved it pretty well, sweetheart.”

Steve huffs, almost a laugh. “Buck, call me sweetheart again, I’m liable to kiss you again.”

Bucky shrugged. “I ain’t saying no.” A slow grin. “Sweetheart.”

Steve laughs, the first real laugh in what feels like a hundred years, and leans forward. Keeps his hands to himself, keeps the kiss less desperate, less hungry. It still shatters him. When they pull apart for breath, Steve is not crying, not exactly. But it feels like it. They kiss for a little while, getting familiar with each other again. Steve tries to swallow down a yawn, pulls away.

Bucky grins. “Long day?”

“Yeah, something like that. When’s reveille?”

One-shoulder shrug. “Up to you. I gotta get up early to set up the booth, you wanna sleep in or come with me?”

Steve laughs, feeling even more like this is all a dream. “With you, Buck. Always.” He hasn’t asked, won’t ask, for any detail Buck won’t give. They’ll go somewhere tomorrow - Steve’s guessing some kind of farmers’ market or something - and it won’t matter, they could be digging coal for all he cares, because Bucky will be there, alive.

Bucky blushes, just a little. “Figured. You wanna hit the hay?”

“Where do you want me?”

This is charged. They haven’t discussed it, any of it, that if this was the war or before it they’d bunk together. Steve’s done the math on this house, there’s one, maybe two extra places to sleep, Bucky can put him anywhere. “You can bunk with me, I mean, if you want. Big bed.”

“Big bed, huh?” Steve can’t stop himself, can’t stop the grin.

“Don’t you go getting any ideas, Cap,” Bucky says with a matching smirk, points a spoon at Steve like an accusing teacher. “I’m a classy dame, need to be wooed. Can’t just show up after a hundred years, eat my food, and get me naked that easy.” They both laugh, and Steve feels some hard stone center of his heart melt, dissolve, lighten.

* * *

“What.” It’s not even a question. Steve had thought he’d been pretending to sleep pretty well. Bucky’s eyes weren’t even open.

“I just,” Steve hid his face in the pillow. His voice came out muffled. “You’re here, and you’re all right, you know? It’s incredible.”

“Look at me,” Makes eye contact. “Pal, if you think I’m doing fine, you’re dumber than a shithouse rat.” Bucky smiles, though, softens it.

“Crazier. Not dumber.” Steve snorts at the obscene gesture Bucky throws his way. “I’m just saying you’re doing, you know, better. You seem better. You’re you, I mean.”

“Who knows, you know?” Bucky rolls onto his back, stretches a little. He flexes one hand, then the other. “Good days and bad ones. Book I’m reading says that’s normal, though.”

“Reading?”

“Well, listening to, you know. Get ‘em from the library.” Bucky rolls back over, looks at Steve like they’re not having a weird conversation about their weird lives in the weird future in which they live, somehow. “Librarians are badass, I asked ‘em what they’d do if some SHIELD goons came sniffin’ around. Know what this little five-foot girl told me?”

“What, Buck?”

“Said she’d smile and tell them to go fuck themselves. Said patron records are private, they’d need a court order and if they went to go get one she’d accidentally wipe the records ‘cause she’s no good with computers.”

“I like her.”

“Yeah, she’s a peach. Reminds me of somebody.”

“Who, me?”

Bucky laughs, eyes crinkling like always. “No, asshole, one of my sisters. I can’t keep ‘em straight but I know I had a bunch and one of ‘em must have been a hell of a firecracker, ‘cause this girl reminded me of them real bad.”

Steve reaches out one hand, carefully. Waits. When Bucky doesn’t stir, he rests the hand on Bucky’s cheek, on his neck, near his ear. “Probably CG, she was terrifying.”

“Tell me about her. Since we’re not gonna sleep, I guess.”

“Ah, jeez, she was older than us. Nearly six feet tall, drop-dead gorgeous. She was the looker of the family.”

“Other than me, of course.”

“Hell no, she beat the pants off you in the looks department. If she’d have had me I’d be Mr. CG Barnes and have a feather duster in my hand, happy as a clam.”

Bucky laughs again. “Figures.”

“Nah, but she was older than us, maybe a year. Real smart. Right hook like a freight train.”

“Sounds like a sister I’d be happy to have.” Bucky’s voice has a little Russian in it now, a little sadness. “She’s dead.”

“They’re all dead, Buck.”

“Yeah. Tell me about them.”

Steve talks and talks, low murmur, about Bucky’s sisters, about what they were like, about his parents, about Sarah Rogers. On and on until the sun rose. They got up, showered, ate. Don’t talk much. It feels, at last, like they had all the time in the world.

“Hang on, sweetheart, I gotta take this.” A burner phone (one of the dozen or so they have between them) blares some godawful rock song and Bucky slips outside.

Steve looks around. Two plates, two forks, a pan soaking in the sink. They’d had eggs, handsful of them, brown and speckled from the girls out back. Bucky hadn’t named them, just called them all the girls. Steve the rooster had gone after Steve the person’s ankles. Bucky’d nearly fallen down laughing as Steve the person had tried to climb up the truck to get away, Steve the rooster in hot pursuit. They kept happening, these little beautiful moments. He can’t bring himself to think of them as finite, of the world outside as real. He prays in his head, asks the Mother of God for this one small gift. Haven’t they had loud enough lives to last forever? The slamming screen door snaps him out of his reverie.

“Buddy of mine,” Bucky gestures at the phone. “Well, I say ‘buddy,’ met him at the farmers’ market a while back. Good kid. Wetwork type of guy, you know. Like me.”

Steve reaches out a hand. “Bucky—“

“No, it’s fine, he’s all good now. Married. Or, hey Stevie, do you call it married if there’s three of ‘em? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure there’s three of ‘em.”

“The fuckin’ future, huh?”

“Sure is something.” Bucky half-smiles, flicks the plates in the arm. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

**Author's Note:**

> title from Kacey Musgraves, "My House," off _Same Trailer, Different Park _(2013)  
> [My House (AOL Sessions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxQTsp9if1M)__


End file.
